Various types of software are used to run, display, and otherwise use electronically-stored content and applications. These players and readers include, as examples, Adobe® Reader®, Adobe® Flash Player®, Adobe Flash Lite™, Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, Microsoft® Windows Media® Player, Microsoft® Silverlight™, iTunes®, iMovie®, and RealPlayer®. For simplicity, both “players” and “readers” are referred to herein simply as “players” and both “content” and “applications” are referred to simply as “content.”
Players are updated from time to time with newer versions. In many circumstances, a newer version is able to play content that a prior version could not. For example, a new version of Adobe® Reader® may display content created on a corresponding new version of a content creation application, which, in this example, could be a new version of Adobe® Acrobat®. Users do not always immediately update their player software to the latest version. Aware of this issue, content authors may wait to adopt or fully utilize new versions of the corresponding authoring applications. For example, an author using Adobe® Acrobat® to create a .pdf may save a new .pdf in an earlier format to ensure its compatibility with more of the players used by its target audience. Authors may be particularly encouraged to create old version content for mobile devices for which downloading an updated player may be a greater inconvenience. Traditionally, a player notifies its user when it encounters content that requires a newer version. The user can then download, install, and use the newer version. Thus, the proliferation of newer versions of players is encouraged by the distribution of content requiring the newer versions. However, this proliferation is slowed by the tendency, described above, for authors to save content in older formats in order to maximize compatibility.
Various techniques have been employed to encourage adoption of a new version of a player. A player may itself be configured to periodically prompt the user to check for updates, as examples, every week or on every device restart. This prompting can become annoying, especially since there will often not be a new version available. An alternative to repetitive prompting is to enable automatic update checking. A user may grant permission to a player to check for updates. However, this forces the user to sacrifice control and security. Moreover, the update checks may occur at inconvenient times, interrupt the user's other tasks, and incur network or data charges. Alternatively, a separate application could be used to monitor availability of newer versions of multiple player applications. This is also not ideal since the extra application needs to itself be installed, run, updated, and may also unnecessarily prompt a user to update and/or use network connectivity.